Responding to Fox News’s contention that Tucker Carlson was in breach of contract when he debuted his Twitter show this week, a lawyer for the fired hard-right host accused the network of attacking his client’s first amendment rights.
“Fox defends its very existence on freedom of speech grounds,” said attorney Bryan Freedman in response to reports, first by Axios, about a letter to Carlson from a lawyer for Fox.
“Now they want to take Tucker Carlson’s right to speak freely away from him because he took to social media to share his thoughts on current events.”
Carlson was fired in April in the aftermath of a $787.5m settlement between Fox and Dominion Voting Systems, which sued for defamation over the broadcast of Donald Trump’s lies about fraud in the 2020 election.
Before the settlement, Fox News mounted its defense on first amendment lines.
The terms of Carlson’s departure are not known. Reports have said the firing was part of the Dominion settlement. Fox News has called such reports “categorically false”. Dominion has said it received the money two days before the case was closed and six days before Carlson was fired.
Carlson trailed his new show on Twitter before debuting on Tuesday with a 10-minute monologue to camera, operating his own teleprompter from what appeared to be a barn at his property in Maine.
Promising to tell viewers the truth without the constraints of mainstream media, Carlson abused Volodymyr Zelenskiy, the president of Ukraine, and claimed Ukraine not Russia was behind an attack on a dam which has caused widespread flooding.
Carlson also flirted with conspiracy theories about 9/11, Jeffrey Epstein and the assassination of John F Kennedy.
In response, Twitter owner Elon Musk said it’s “great to have shows from all parts of the political spectrum on this platform!”
A lawyer for Fox reportedly told Carlson he was “in breach” of his contract, adding that the network “reserves all rights and remedies which are available to it”, according to Axios.
Fox News did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
Among observers, Carlson’s argument received short shrift.
On Twitter, the tech writer and podcaster Kara Swisher said: “Free speech? Hardly. He made a new show. Twitter is a media platform. He just wants to get out of a binding contract he signed and got paid big money for.
“As with Musk, he thinks legal agreements don’t apply to him because he is a special snowflake.”
By Thursday morning, the inaugural Tucker on Twitter episode had been viewed more than 102m times.
